Triad Investment Management

06/12/2025

Productive investing can be thought of from the perspective of farming.

🍃 Pulling things up every few days to look at the roots doesn’t help the plant to grow.

🍃 Far from a “do nothing” job – thought and effort goes into picking the right seeds, right soil and right weather for growth.

🍃 Daily activity isn’t correlated with results (plant growth) yet it’s vital to monitor it for problems (bugs, etc.).

Photo by Dietmap Richle on Unsplash

06/02/2025

From a recent note to clients:

"President Trump is a poker player, one who goes “all in” and puts all his chips on the table early. We believe that Trump has established his maximum tariff position and is now seeking to negotiate much lower rates with most of our trading partners. The advantages of relatively free trade in our global trading system are too important to cast aside permanently. So, we’d guess cooler heads prevail and a relatively rational trade outcome should develop over the next 3 to 6
months. We don’t believe this goes on beyond the end of 2025. Remember, mid-term elections are next year, and the Republicans will want a growing economy, and happy voters when election campaigns rev up in early 2026....It’s still a highly uncertain short-term environment, although the Battleship U.S.S. United States has endured many stormy waters before without sinking. We believe this period is no different."

01/31/2025

Recently attended my first Brooklyn Nets game. Happened to show up on Vince Carter’s jersey retirement night. Most of us don’t have a jersey for the rafters..but we’re all going to retire. A good reminder to think about what you want yours to look like…now.

01/13/2025

2 things that can help your retirement planning:

1 - Be an investor not a speculator. What does that mean? Investment legend Ben Graham wrote:

“An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and a satisfactory return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative.”

2 - See the value of doing the hardest thing in the world…nothing. Why?

We tend to equate visible activity with results.

We tend to have short attention spans and time horizons.

signin

12/04/2024

What an interesting article about the next phase of the famous Bandon Dunes. I've always been interested in how this was developed.

https://files.constantcontact.com/c1f49c1b201/764c8be9-96ed-40e6-aee6-9cfbad783839.pdf

12/02/2024

Getting caught up in news and headlines. Media companies want this to be our daily activity and they spend billions to make it happen. Have they succeeded?

It gives us a place to hide from taking action. Action can be serious planning and investing yourself. Action can be sitting down with us to assess what you’re doing and whether it’s productive for your goals.


[Photo by Joel Holland on Unsplash]

11/29/2024

In Japan, a pop-up restaurant called The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders only hires servers with dementia. Customers will not necessarily get the right order or the same level of service. As their website notes: “even if your order is mistaken, everything on our menu is delicious and one of a kind…it’s OK if my order was wrong. It tastes so good anyway. We hope this feeling of openness and understanding will spread across Japan, and through the world.”

This is a slightly unusual restaurant that was created to promote understanding of dementia and to spread kindness all over the world.

11/27/2024

When we create financial plans -- meaning we find ways to delay financial gratification to benefit the future -- one way to think about it is that you’re having a conversation between your 55, 65-year-old self and your 85-year-old self. I know, kind of weird.

But what would your 85-year-old self want you to do today in terms of planning? Everyone has different goals from retirement to planning for generational wealth transfer to funding deeply loved charitable organizations. All these goals need to be planned as early as possible.

As with estate planning and other areas of life, when you don’t make a plan of your own…you are still following a plan. It’s just someone else’s.

11/25/2024

We’re not designed to multi-task. Sometimes we think we can try to do 2-3 things at the same time. But why shouldn’t we?

The article linked below from fs.blog on cognitive overall could be long enough to cause a little cognitive overload on its own! You don’t have to read it. Here’s what I got out of it:

• Our brain’s decision-making network doesn’t prioritize the importance of a decision and can be as “used up” by trivial Facebook messages as by important decisions.
• Our brains evolved to focus on one thing at a time. This enabled our ancestors to hunt animals, to create and fashion tools, to protect their clan from predators and invading neighbors.
• Attention is the most essential mental resource. Our attentional system has evolved to protect us from non-important details, letting us live on “autopilot” when it makes sense.
• Multitasking is the enemy of a focused attentional system. Increasingly, we demand that our attentional system try to focus on several things at once, something that it was not evolved to do.
• We are social creatures. We are easily swayed by first-person stories and vivid accounts of a single experience. Although this is statistically wrong and we should learn to overcome the bias, most of us don’t.

https://fs.blog/the-history-of-cognitive-overload/

Timeless lessons and insights that help you think better, learn faster, and make smart decisions.

11/22/2024

Thoughts on overdiversification.

So many people have 10-12 funds in their accounts they show us. Let’s say the typical fund has 150-200 holdings per fund (probably more).

That’s close to 2,000 different holdings (equities, etc.) in their account right there. You don’t need that many securities. We typically select 20-25 equities in our portfolios as a reference point. You can do more or less than that, but hopefully not 2,000.

11/20/2024

“So you can move the needle a lot by focusing on what not to do in life.”
-Morgan Housel

This article is a update to what Charlie Munger and others have said in the past - highlight several paths to misery with the idea that if you avoid them, you’ll be actually quite far along on the way to being happy. Good strategy and Housel's a good writer.

https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/assured-misery/

People tend to know what makes them angry with more certainty than what might make them happy.

11/18/2024

Quality. Went from a 1980s buzzword to table stakes in many industries. Fast food…not so much. One exception is a chain that builds garish teal drive-through restaurants with a giant burger, drink, hot dog and fries stuck on the front.

Pal’s Sudden Service has only 31 restaurants in Tennessee and Virginia. Employees receive 120 hours of training before serving their first customer. Very fast (sudden?) and accurate service (4x the service speeds of competitors). Ongoing quizzes to maintain proficiency. And the first restaurant to earn the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (joining the ranks of hospitals, schools, and luxury hotels that typically compete for it).

A fellow Baldrige award winner worked at Pal’s for a day – he called it one of the best-managed companies, with employees well trained, never given more than they could handle, respected, and given growth opportunities. The result: steady same-store sales, market share growth, and die-hard fans of both their food and service.